Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday December 30, 2010
|
CANTI
Giacomo Leopardi. Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374235031
498 pages
$35
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books every Thursday for The Washington Post
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is generally regarded as Italy's greatest 19th-century poet. His "Canti" -- or songs -- range from the patriotic history poem ("To Italy") and the meditative lyric ("Broom") to verse epistles ("Recantation") and despairing cris de coeur ("Infinity"). Like any good romantic, he regularly reflects on the yearning for love, the consolations of nature, the transitoriness of all things and the deep yet moonlit loneliness of life.
It's hardly surprising then that his poems bear such familiar-sounding titles as "The Solitary Thrush" and "To Spring." Sometimes Leopardi actually sounds a bit like Wordsworth, surveying a landscape, recalling the past -- "This lonely hill was always dear to me" -- and then sliding into an evocation of the sublime: "But sitting here and gazing, I can see/beyond, in my mind's eye, unending spaces,/and superhuman silences, and depthless calm/till what I feel/is almost fear." But for the Italian poet, there is no redemptive epiphany. For just as Baudelaire was racked by that combination of melancholy, disgruntlement and boredom that he called "Spleen," so Leopardi constantly suffers its Italian equivalent, "Noia," the void or emptiness within.
Here, for instance, is his short poem "A Se Stesso" -- "To Himself" -- in Jonathan Galassi's moving translation:
Now you'll rest forever,
worn-out heart. The ultimate illusion
that I thought was eternal died. It died.
I know not just the hope but the desire
for loved illusions is done for us.
Be still forever.
You have beaten enough.
Nothing deserves your throbbing, nor is earth
worth sighing over. Life is only
bitterness and boredom, and the world is filth.
Now be calm. Despair for the last time.
Death is the one thing
fate gave our kind.
Disdain yourself now, nature, the brute
hidden power that rules to common harm
and the boundless vanity of all.
Leopardi grew up in the small town of Recanati, where his charming but stern father was the local grandee, a man who dressed in dandyish black every day and rued the day he had married his cold and religiose wife. According to Leopardi, his unnaturally pious mother viewed any death as a happy occasion since another soul had flown to heaven.
Sickly all his life, Leopardi ruined his health by spending virtually his entire adolescence squirreled away in his father's library. Learning entranced him, so much so that as an adolescent he was able to annotate the work of ancient rhetoricians and translate into Latin Porphyry's "Commentary on the Life of Plotinus." But by the time he was 18, he had acquired a permanently hunched back, impaired vision and hypersensitivity to cold: Even in the hottest weather, he would work with a heavy lap robe on his knees.
While he yearned for love, the women Leopardi adored were all out of reach: neighboring servant girls who died young, elegant matrons who ignored him or merely toyed with his affections. Thus he speaks of "the woman who cannot be found," a creature as elusive as the blue flower of the German romantics. Although soon half in love with easeful death, Leopardi nonetheless lived on until his late 30s, until -- literally unable to breathe -- he died in Naples, beloved of a small circle of literati and cared for by a long-suffering friend.
Leopardi was not just a poet, he was also a prose writer of distinction, regarded by Nietzsche as one of the four best of the 19th century. He composed fables ("Dialogue Between a Sprite and a Gnome"), short satires, maxims and philosophical essays, much of the material drawn from the several thousand pages of the journal he called his "Zibaldone" (hodgepodge). Here is one entry (taken from the highly recommended "Giacomo Leopardi: Selected Prose and Poetry," translated by Iris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs):
"What is life? The journey of a sick cripple who, with a heavy burden on his back, climbs over steep mountains and through desolate, exhausting, and arduous lands, in the snow, the frost, the rain, the wind, under the blazing sun, for many days, without ever resting by day or night, in order to reach a certain precipice or ditch, into which inevitably he must fall."
In his endnotes to the "Canti," Galassi points out that the first complete English translation of the "Zibaldone" will be published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 2012. In a world of evanescent fiction and fluff, that's the kind of publishing a great house undertakes. So too is Galassi's own rich edition of the "Canti," prefaced by a long introduction, Italian originals and his English translations on facing pages, an annotated timeline of Leopardi's life and a hundred pages of often-detailed textual commentary. The last is particularly valuable for its citations from Italian scholarship. For instance, Ugo Dotti summarizes Leopardi's poetic thought as "the inevitable unhappiness of modern man thrown into a world turned upside down yet aware of an irremediably lost 'happiness.'"
If you know even a smattering of the language, it is always a pleasure to glance at Leopardi's Italian. "The Evening of the Holiday" opens: "Dolce e chiara e la notte e senza vento," which Galassi translates quite simply and beautifully as "The night is soft and bright and without wind." This is, I suspect, a faint echo, almost a variation of, Petrarch's famous line, "Chiare fresche e dolci acque" ("Clear, fresh and sweet waters"). In his introduction, Galassi underscores that Leopardi confronted and eventually transcended the overwhelming influence of Petrarch.
What finally makes Leopardi so appealing a poet is his combination of a classical intelligence coupled with a hypersensitivity to his own inner self and a sometimes enraptured, sometimes acerbic style. In "Recantation," for instance, he imagines a Utopian future, one in which "human happiness will be perfected," where "silk and wool clothing/will be softer daily," and a tunnel will run under the Thames, and the smallest city be well lit at night. It will be a "manly age,/concerned with the hard facts of economics, immersed in politics," with no interest in mere affections. "What good does exploring/your heart do you?" Instead, a friend advises Leopardi to "sing our century's needs and its ripe hope." The poet answers that he doesn't think that he "can make what this age needs." "But hope, I'll surely sing of." And so he does.
Over the past half-century American readers have embraced the translated poetry of Rilke, Cavafy, Neruda and Akhmatova. Thanks to Jonathan Galassi's edition of the "Canti," it's Leopardi's turn now.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
SEA CHANGE
Jeremy Page
Viking
ISBN 978-0670021901
274 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor
Nicole Kidman's "Rabbit Hole" opens Friday on a tide of advance praise and mutterings about Oscar nominations. It's an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a couple whose 4-year-old son is accidentally killed. Acclaimed movies about horse-racing or India or Julia Child usually stir up interest in related books, but Jeremy Page's thoughtful novel about a father who loses his 4-year-old daughter is unlikely to get that boost from Hollywood. There is a limit, after all, to how much any of us wants to consider such tragedies, and yet the demands of this grim subject have inspired some novelists' best work. Anne Tyler portrayed grieving parents in one of her finest novels, as did Anne Hood, Stephen King, Francine Prose, Stewart O'Nan, Lorrie Moore and others.
"Sea Change" -- the title is the only thing worn out about this novel -- begins with a death that shatters a young family. It's an arresting 15-page chapter in which Guy and his wife, Judy, are enjoying a lovely day with their daughter, Freya. Guy "knows even then, that he will want to hold on to this moment for the rest of his life," Page writes, "to be with her, in that wide sunny field in East Anglia, crouching by the horseradish plants." But then the scene of parental bliss is interrupted by an uncanny act of violence, surreal and terrifying, like a Grimm fairy tale imposed on an unsuspecting modern family.
The rest of this relatively short novel takes place five years later in the shadow of that tragedy, as Page marks out the peculiar but wholly believable trajectory of one man's grief and possible recovery. When we see Guy again, he's in his late 30s, living alone with "the unassailable truth that life has stopped but time has not." On an old Dutch barge called the Flood in the Blackwater estuary off Essex, he gives over his existence entirely to the rhythms of nature, a concession that seems idyllic but also suspiciously resigned: "The way the tide lifts your whole life up just to put it back down in the mud twice a day," Guy says, "that's wonderful, when you're asleep and you start to float -- I really like that -- it's like you drift away in every sense, from yourself."
What looks like a suicide attempt -- swimming dangerously far away from his barge -- may really be part of a brutal treatment regimen that he's designed for himself. "Floating this far away from the Flood, he feels disembodied," Page writes. "It gives him clarity. Clarity to view his last few years like a frayed rope, each strand of it working itself loose from the thing it had once been, each strand still with the curled shape of the life it was once part of. Now unsupported, weakened, unravelling."
He sets himself up with several more life-threatening challenges, and a good deal of the novel's muted suspense stems from these self-imposed ordeals, which may kill him or cleanse him -- or drive him mad. Guy's plaintive calls to his daughter on the dark water of the North Sea are, frankly, almost too sad to endure, but they sound entirely true. Those of us doomed to see our young children killed or maimed endure a lifetime of nightmares, re-enactments and merciless second-guessing. For years after my first daughter was severely brain damaged, I dreamed of her running toward me, a fantasy that always made me feel both elated and devastated in just the way Page describes.
Guy takes his only comfort from a diary in which "he's written every evening for the last five years, since his life changed irrevocably. And thinking this way, he's able to begin, knowing he can no longer imagine his days passing without doing it." But what initially sounds therapeutic is really a crippling, addictive fantasy: His diary is a minute re-creation of the life he and his wife would have led had their daughter lived, and as such it's a kind of a faux record, a painful demonstration of the layers of self-deception that grief pushes us to. His fictional experience with this now-make-believe family is "such a regular part of his routine it's been more real, at times, than the life they all had, when they were together."
Page is a sensitive, pensive writer, and he has endowed Guy with the same skill to compose this poignant story within the story. "It's a wonderful thing to write," Guy thinks. "You can reclaim the things you lost." But in practice, Guy is too talented for his own good: In the effort to describe his wife and daughter as accurately as possible, he ends up creating a fully dynamic set of characters who quickly veer away from his control and begin to enact the tensions that were already pulling on his family before Freya died. The compensations of fantasy seem destined to be overwhelmed by his own fidelity to the truth.
As introspective and painful as "Sea Change" is, it remains engaging and even surprising all the way to the end. Page knows enough about real grief to be aware that it follows no regular stages. Guy's drifting course across the sea takes him through troughs of despair and moments of transcendence, but it eventually leads him to something wholly undefined and evocative, perhaps the only possible destination after such a tragedy. This is a difficult book to recommend -- a voyage into dark waters all of us want to avoid -- but if something about the description resonates with you, seek it out; it won't lead you astray.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
| Recent Stories |
 OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: Adventures of an Observer
THREE BOOKS ABOUT HORSES
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT: A Personal Biography
LEADING ROLES: 50 Questions Every Arts Board Should Ask
THE TURQUOISE LEDGE |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
